BANG OUT

1. Debbie: I’m coming home from school when suddenly my best friend Trudy says, “Your feet are lighting up when you walk.” I look down and see that flashes of blue are coming out the back of my shoes whenever I move. “Cool,” I say and start skipping so that the blue lights follow me to my house, and Trudy is laughing and saying, “That’s so weird” over and over again. I feel like Tom Hanks in the movie “Big,” when he lights up the giant piano with his feet, and I’m pretending to play “Heart and Soul” in the driveway when my mom comes out and starts screaming. “Debbie,” she says, “Take off your shoes.” But I’m laughing, because the blue lights are coming out of the side of my feet now, and I feel like I’m wearing jet packs. My mom shakes me and says, “Don’t you know fire when you see it?” and I take off my shoes, which are hot around the edges. The fire is still coming out of my feet, snapping like the ends of a lighting strike, and I’m not smiling anymore. Mom tells Trudy to run a bath, and I think about how they have been teaching us in school that if the sun exploded, it would take 9 minutes for us to know about it because it’s so far away. It would take 20 minutes for the fireballs to reach us.


2. Roger on Mercury: People always ask me how we can walk on a planet that is 800 degrees Fahrenheit and not burn up. The answer is two-fold. First, we have built platforms on one of the poles of Mercury, which is much colder and allows us to work in lower temperatures. Secondly, our suits are deeply insulated and cooled by recirculating liquid, which keeps us at 98.6 degrees.

The second question I get asked is why we’re mining Mercury in the first place. The company has authorized me to say that in addition to petroleum oil, tests indicate that Mercury is a good source of iron, natural gas, and gold. It’s an exceptionally dense planet with a relatively big core, and that bodes well for us.

Third, I’m asked how dangerous the job is. I’m forbidden to talk about any accidents that might have occurred, but mining is always difficult, as you know. I will tell you, however, that when things fall off the platform toward the surface of Mercury, solar winds tend to blast the object into the atmosphere. On Mercury, the sun appears three times bigger than it appears on earth, so that it looks like a small clock in the sky.


3. Jack London After His House Burned Down: The house was almost finished. The workers had come that day and wiped the wood with linseed oil so that it smelled like the inside of a lantern. As I sat on the wall of the third floor, watching the sun set over my 1,400-acre ranch, I found myself wishing that I could free myself from writing 1,000 words every day. Here I am, the highest paid writer in the world, and all I care about is the working of the land, and this house, the legacy that I thought would stand long after I am gone.

But then that night, the servants woke me to say the house was on fire. I ran the mile up the road, and it was true. Flames rolled out of the top of the house like a flag in the wind. We threw buckets of water on the blaze, but the house was lost. It was made from redwood trees thousands of years old, and it was gone in an hour.

I told the reporters that I would rebuild, but I know that I won’t. I’m tired. I have a million dollars in debt for a house that I’ll never live in, and more than a million words to write before I get myself out of it.


4. Sadie in Hell: I wish I had paid more attention to Buddhist pain theory when I was alive. I would be better equipped to (ow) endure this endless fire (ow) that is consuming me. I spend most of my time (ow) trying to escape (ow) into my mind by remembering life on earth (ow) which I thought majorly sucked. But here I am, sitting in a lake of fire (ow) and by comparison, my mom being kind of a bitch doesn’t seem that bad. I think she might be in here somewhere with me (ow) but I don’t want to open my eyes because somehow, seeing your body—if you can call it a body anymore—on fire (ow) makes the pain worse. In any case, all that petty earth stuff doesn’t matter in here. We just try to remember cool things, like snow and shade and the soft gray body of water. (Ow.) They say that after a few eons, you can’t remember water anymore, but I try anyway.


5. Me in DC: In the Smithsonian, my boyfriend and I got in a fight over the flavor of water. He was trying to get me to drink more water because the DC heat—105 degrees, high humidity—was getting to me. I explained that I don’t like the flavor of water and he said, “What are you talking about? Water doesn’t have any flavor,” and then the fight turned into how I shouldn’t have said something that I said to his mother and he walked off, leaving me standing in front of Julia Child’s kitchen. I bought a soda from a hotdog vendor outside and drank it, the sugary fizz scraping down my throat.

That night, I woke up in his sister’s bedroom and found that I couldn’t open my eyes. The eyelids had cleaved to my eyeballs and I had to use my fingers to pry them open. With only slits for vision, I stumbled to the bathroom. There was no glass by the sink, so I shoved my mouth under the tap and let Washington DC’s mossy city water flow down my throat.

As soon as it hit my tongue, my body let go of the moisture it was holding hostage, and tears began to flow under my eyelids and out the side of my eyes. I stood there in the bathroom my boyfriend had used all his life, water running in hot rivulets down my cheeks. Crying had never felt so good.




Copyright © 2010, Joy Lanzendorfer